If you are running a solution provider business today that is not driving 51 percent of profit from the service side of the house, you need to take a hard look at your business and ask how you are going to get there.

Because the technology market is continually changing, there is no perfect channel for very long. But there is a way to get very close to one, and it requires CEO leadership, a team of loyal executives that believe in the goal, and a commitment to take feedback from the field and build a business that is easier to work with.

Does it make sense for solution providers to resell the Amazon cloud? Here a few important questions you have to ask in order to make the decision to put the livelihood of your customers' business on the Amazon cloud.

The time is now for the channel to reap the rewards of deploying cloud services. But while the key attribute to capitalizing on past tech trends were technical skills, the future in the cloud is all about sales and marketing.